Julie and Romeo Read online

  At two o’clock it was as if some unseen switch had been flipped and the customers simply stopped coming in. I can’t explain it, but it worked that way every week. Sandy rounded up the kids to go home. I would stay until five, cleaning up whatever Tony hadn’t gotten around to and working on the books. People like to know you’re open until five on Saturday, even if they never come by.

  “Okay,” Sandy said. “We’re off.” She kissed my cheek in celebration of our good day together. Kissing was something we rarely did anymore. I held on to her for a second. I didn’t know what was coming, but I knew it might be bad. I had a maudlin flash that maybe this was the last time I was going to get to see everybody. I hugged the kids. I could sacrifice myself to save them.

  “Go,” I said, trying not to choke up. “Have a fantastic day.”

  I stood at the door and waved good-bye to them. Tony and Sarah loved to wave and be waved to. After they had gone I just stood there at the door. It was nice of him to wait until my family was gone. It made me feel better, knowing it was just me they wanted.

  He watched Sandy and the kids drive away and then he tossed his magazine on the seat beside him, got out of the car, checked the meter again, and came across the street. I was sick with dread but wanted to appear brave. I held the door open for him.

  “My,” he said, “that’s service.”

  He was dressed as a priest. I hadn’t noticed the white collar before. I was sure he caused less suspicion that way. “What do you want?” I said straight out.

  He looked at me a little puzzled. “Want? Oh yes, some flowers. I was thinking about getting something different for the altar. We’re in a bit of a rut.”

  I sighed. All the work of my day fell on me all of a sudden, the digging, the sales. I felt old. “Cut the flowers,” I said, not intending any pun. “Just get to it. I’m really tired of you people. If you’re going to shoot me, shoot me, whatever.”

  Now the man looked very puzzled. There was not one chance in the world that he was a priest who had spent the entire day in his car trying to figure out what floral arrangement he wanted for his church. “Shoot you?”

  “Whatever your plan is. I don’t know. Threaten me, scare me to death—whatever it is you have to do, I just want to get it done, okay?”

  “Do you know me?” the man in black asked.

  “Sure, you’re the guy who’s been parked across the street off and on since nine o’clock this morning, waiting for my daughter and my grandchildren to leave so that you could come in and have a private word with me. Am I right so far?”

  “Oh, I am bad at this,” he said, looking genuinely crestfallen. “It never occurred to me that you might notice.”

  “And what you have to say to me has to do with the Cacciamanis, correct?”

  “How do you know all this? This is very impressive. Romeo was right, you really are something. Except for the shooting part. You’re wrong about that. I have no intention of shooting you.”

  “Romeo?”

  “I’m Father Alphonse,” he said, sticking out his meaty hand. “You can call me Al.”

  “Father Al?”

  “Just Al is fine. Whatever you feel comfortable with. You’re Jewish, right?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s all about what works for you. I answer to anything. I’m not so crazy about Alphonse, but you can call me that if you want.”

  “Romeo sent you?”

  “It isn’t really part of my job description: baptisms, weddings, last rites, courier service. It could be a new direction for the church to go in, though.” He chuckled at his own joke. I might have chuckled, too, at another time, but as for now I was completely beyond jokes.

  “And Romeo sent you because …” I was trying to prompt him.

  “Well, he’s stuck. He can’t call you, he can’t come by. He’s being watched by his family, you’re being watched by your family. The idea is that no one suspects a priest, which is funny because you did suspect a priest. You really do break all the rules.”

  “I’ve been told that.”

  “Romeo and I go way back. All the way back. From first grade at St. Catherine’s. He was lining up for the priesthood himself, you know. Did he tell you that? Then he met Camille on a bus. He made the right choice. She was a great woman, Camille.” He gave me a nervous look. “Meaning no disrespect to you.”

  “None taken.”

  “When God took Camille, Romeo never thought there was going to be anyone else for him. He thought his life was over. And he kept on thinking that pretty much until he met you.”

  “Me?”

  “Romeo is crazy about you,” the priest said.

  Crazy about me? I wanted to kiss him for that. What a yo-yo this was. Hate Cacciamanis, love Romeo. Hate Cacciamanis, love Romeo. “Nobody else in his family is crazy about me.”

  “Have they been giving you a bad time?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  Al shook his head and clucked his tongue. “Romeo was afraid of that. He’s very worried about you. He wanted to come here, but he thought that might just make everything harder.”

  “He has good instincts.”

  “There’s a lot of bad blood between your families, a great deal of pain.”

  I looked at him. He had a pleasant face, dark round eyes and a wide mouth. “Say, you wouldn’t happen to know what’s behind all this, would you? You’re a priest, people tell you things. Do you know why our families hate each other so much?”

  “People do tell me things, but I’m not allowed to repeat them.”

  “Not even in emergencies?”

  “Sorry.” He took an envelope out of his coat pocket and handed it to me. “I can give you this, though.”

  The envelope said Julie on it. I wish I could say my heart leapt at the sight of Romeo’s handwriting, but I had never seen his handwriting before.

  “Go ahead,” he said, “read it. I’m supposed to wait for a reply.” Al turned his back and stared at the asters. He leaned over to sniff them. I opened the note.

  Dear Julie,

  I told you when I met you again that I had been wanting to write you a letter. Well, here it is. Sorry doesn’t begin to express how terrible I feel about everything that has happened. If you are in half the trouble that I’m in, then you know what I’m talking about. As much as I know the answer is to walk away from each other and forget about it, I just can’t do that. Please meet me tomorrow morning in the CVS at nine o’clock. Tell Al I’ll go to Mass tonight. Give me one day so that we can, at the very least, make things right between us, even if we can’t make things right between our families.

  Love,

  Romeo

  “Oh,” I said, holding on to the paper.

  “Good news, I hope,” Al said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what constitutes good news anymore.”

  “Well, you don’t have to give me an answer now.” He took out his wallet and gave me a card. There was his name, his number, and the address at St. Catherine’s Church. It would have been like anybody else’s business card, except for the little picture of an upside-down dove on it. “You can call me. I have an answering machine.” He tapped the card. “That’s my private number.”

  I turned the card around and around in my fingers, trying to figure it all out. “Listen,” I said. “If you’re not in such a hurry, could you stick around for a little while? I know you’ve already been here all day, but if you could give me a little bit more time, say, ten minutes?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve got ten minutes.”

  I put the letter and the card in the pocket of my smock. “Come in the back with me. I’ll make you an arrangement. You said you wanted something new for the altar?”

  “Oh, I was just making small talk. Romeo gives us our flowers.”

  “Well, this week I’m giving you the flowers. This week the flowers at St. Catherine’s are brought to you by Roseman’s. That will be a first, Jewish flowers
.”

  “Flowers are flowers,” he said. “I’d never turn them down.”

  I got Al a stool and he came and sat with me while I worked. The new flowers came in on Monday morning and so I gave him everything I had. If someone had come in asking for a bouquet I would have had to send them away, told them I was empty. It took me a lot longer than ten minutes, but I gave him my masterpiece. The flowers were graceful, towering. They reached the tips of their petals straight up to a Catholic God. It was not as good as Romeo’s, but it was a deeply ambitious arrangement. It was all Al could do to work it into his car. He held my hand. He could not thank me enough.

  “No,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Anything else?” Al asked me at the curb.

  “Yes,” I said. “Tell him yes.”

  chapter ten

  I CLOSED UP EARLY. WHY NOT? THERE WERE NO MORE flowers. I called Gloria.

  “I need to shop,” I said. “And I need advice.”

  “My two favorite things in the world. Can I give you advice while we shop?”

  “That would be best.”

  “Buzz drove up the Cape this morning to fish. According to my calculations, he is absolutely stuck in traffic on Route Six about now. I’ll pick you up.”

  Over the years I had wondered many times why my marriage to Mort couldn’t have been more like my friendship with Gloria. Not that I needed Mort to go shopping with me (though once or twice in the course of thirty-four years would have been nice), but I wished I could have called him when I needed advice and thought he might be willing to drop everything. Gloria, I knew, would fly back from her first European vacation if I had needed her help, and I would have done the same for her. It was an understanding between us. Mort would tell me to hold on, whatever it was could wait while he puttered through the tasks at hand. When he did show up, he never would have remembered that I had needed something from him. When I asked him again, he would tell me to hang on one second and then he would go to get a sandwich. And even when I had his attention, it would wander away from me. “Julie, look at that,” he would say as I was pouring out my heart. “Do you see that water stain on the ceiling? How long has that been there?” What happened was that over the years I just stopped asking, I stopped trying to confide. If I had a problem, I went to Gloria. If I had a little success that merited celebration, she was the one I called. If it was a failure, a fear, a questionable lump that required someone sitting with me in the doctor’s office for three hours, it was Gloria, not Mort, who was there. Gloria, I knew, would love me unconditionally, as we had loved each other when we were fourteen and there was no one else to love. She told me the truth when I asked for it and sometimes when I didn’t. When we disagreed (rarely), we did so with respect. She had seen me through Nora’s biker phase and Sandy’s would-be childhood marriage. I had seen her through her daughter Kate’s anorexia and her son Jeff’s arrest after a one-night spree of stealing radios out of cars. After all our kids were grown, she stayed with me and Mort for two months when she finally left Shelly, her first husband. Mort liked Gloria, but he groused, not about her presence in the guest room, but about our closeness.

  “You’re always talking,” he said. “My God, it never stops. You would think she’d been in Tibet for twenty years instead of eight blocks away.”

  But what Mort didn’t understand was that I wanted to talk. I wanted someone to hash things out with, somebody who paid attention and remembered. That was Gloria. That was not my husband.

  I told her about old woman Cacciamani on our way to Saks. I told her about Al the priest as we pulled into the lot. When we had secured a good parking space and turned off the engine, I showed her the letter.

  “You were holding out on me,” she said, digging through her purse for her glasses. I handed her mine. “This should have been first.” She read it carefully and then she read it again. She held it up to the light as if to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit. “This is good. And you said yes?”

  “I said yes.”

  “I never would have thought otherwise. I wouldn’t have a fool for a best friend.”

  “I have some decisions to make.”

  “He doesn’t give you a lot of help with the dress code. And this business of always meeting at CVS is a little weird.”

  “It’s only the second time. And the first time was my idea.”

  “That’s fair enough. Maybe it will turn out to be ‘your place.’ You can go there for anniversaries.”

  We got out of the car and walked toward the store. I had no business spending money on anything, but after the last couple of days I’ll admit I felt like I deserved a treat. “Help me control myself.”

  “How do you mean that?”

  “Financially.”

  “That part is no problem. For the rest you’re on your own.”

  We swung through the doors and immediately I felt comforted by the smell of perfume and face powder and new shoes. I always thought about Holly Golightly saying that nothing bad could happen to a person in Tiffany’s. As far as I was concerned, the same held true for Saks.

  Gloria stopped at the Chanel counter, politely brushed off the salesgirl, and ran three different stripes of lipstick across the top of her hand. “Now, the first thing you want my advice on is your clothes. That’s the easy part. The second thing you want my advice on is Sandy and Nora.” She rolled her hand back and forth in the light trying to decide which was her best color.

  I picked up a tube called Splendor and drew a line across the inside of my wrist, making myself look like a victim of a suicide attempt. “Precisely.”

  “I want to tell you to lie. Every instinct I have thinks that you should lie, you know that.”

  “I do.”

  “But you won’t, because you really can’t. You lied once and it ended up so badly. Lying to your children is totally different from lying to your husband or even your friends. Lying to your children can have all sorts of psychological repercussions for everyone involved, and you just don’t want to get into that.

  “On the other hand.” She stopped and picked up a pretty black compact containing four round pats of eye shadow, butter and lavender, pink and gray. “Isn’t this beautiful? Don’t you want to buy this? I never could make any sense out of eye shadow.” She put it down and picked up her train of thought. “On the other hand, telling them is just going to be hell.”

  “Think Saigon in 1972.”

  “Right,” she said. “That’s your problem in a nutshell.”

  “And the answer?”

  Gloria smiled at me sadly. “There isn’t an answer, angel, because there isn’t a question. You know you’re going to tell them, you know it’s going to be awful, and that’s really all there is to it.” Her eyes teared up a little bit. Gloria was every bit as willing to cry for me as she was for herself.

  I felt comforted by the depth of her sympathy. The thing about talking to Gloria was that it was a little like talking to myself, only much better. With Mort I was always trying to convince, to state and prove my case. Gloria believed me right from the start. She only wanted to help me come to my own logical conclusions.

  “So I guess that’s solved,” I said heavily.

  “Well, at least that leaves us the fun part. Don’t forget you’re going to spend the day with Romeo tomorrow.”

  “I do forget that. Given how this day started out, it still seems pretty hard to believe.”

  Gloria discouraged me from buying the cotton sweater that came down almost to my knees. She encouraged me to buy a matching underwear set in a color the gorgeous twenty-something salesgirl called champagne.

  “It’s good with your skin tone,” the salesgirl said.

  “Black is too aggressive for the first time,” Gloria said. “Black says you knew all along you were going to have sex.”

  “I don’t know that we are,” I said.

  “See, all the more reason to go champagne.”

  There was lace on both the bra and panties, but not so m
uch that I felt like I was trying to pass myself off as Belgian. “I’m so out of practice. I’ve been buying my underwear at Target for so long, I didn’t know they sold it anywhere else.”

  “Welcome back to the world,” the salesgirl said, and took my credit card.

  Since I had spent all of my discretionary income on two articles of underwear, I decided to content myself with something I already owned for outerwear. Gloria thought it was a good plan, seeing as how he had never seen ninety-eight percent of my clothes, anyway.

  She looked at her watch and steered me toward a phone in the women’s lounge. “You need to call Nora now and tell her to come over.”

  “I can call her once I get home.”

  Gloria handed me a quarter and a dime. “Tell her you’re on your way and you want to meet her there.” She looked at me hard. “Do you want me to dial?”

  I took the change and called my oldest daughter, who, to my complete surprise and disappointment, answered the phone. I requested the meeting.

  “This is Cacciamani business, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  Nora sighed. “Sandy’s already told me about salting the roses.”

  One positive side effect of all of this was it seemed to be bringing Sandy and Nora closer together. “Well, there’s more.”

  “So much more you can’t tell me over the phone?”

  “It would just be a lot easier if I could talk to you both together.”

  Nora sighed again. Really, she had perfected the art of the sigh. It was at once bored and inconvenienced. “All right. I’ll be there in a half an hour.”